August: Osage County (2014)Movies

Nothing says Christmas like a cancer-ridden matriarch being grappled to the floor in “August: Osage County,’’ a star-laden, if somewhat wobbly, adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning black comedy that also serves up side dishes of suicide, pedophilia and incest.

Wearing a black fright wig that scarcely hides the ravages of her character’s chemotherapy for mouth cancer, Meryl Streep rules as the mother of all Hollywood monsters — a cross between Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’’ and Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’

Streep’s Violet Weston terrorizes her three daughters and other kin gathered in her crumbling Oklahoma mansion for a funeral supper following the burial...